Field Notes: “I saw Depression’s physical form. She whom the Greeks called Oizys and the Romans Miseria, Misery. At the time I had no idea The Ancients had such a goddess and I had never thought to personify my distress and yet…There she was. Black as her mother Night. When I saw her I wanted to kill her. At the same time though, I knew she was already dead and also that she could never die. Hers was a presence somehow defined by being less than the emptiness around her. Less than Nothing. A presence like a hole. Yet for all that she was somehow smiling. Beckoning. Most of all, I remember she was cold.”
Mary of the Gael: “After her death, the ‘Mary of the Gael’ [St Brigid of Kildare] became the centre of a cult across Ireland and further afield. Her miraculous help with childbirth, her protection of flocks and herds, and the healing power of her wells testified – still, in fact, testify – to her continued presence in the landscape…That, at any rate, is the Christian version of her life. But there is a neo-pagan version too, which is gaining in popularity as Irish Christianity withers. This has it that St Brigid – if she even existed – was a Christianisation of the pre-Christian ‘Celtic’ goddess Brigid, said to have been the goddess of fire, smithwork and poetry, amongst other things. St Brigid’s Day is, we are told, the same date as the old pre-Christian festival of ‘Imbolc,’ which was reworked by the Church as a means of suppressing or appropriating the old religion. Mother goddesses are more fashionable these days than Christian saints, and so it goes with the grain of the times to tell a tale of a female goddess displaced by a male God.”
The Blockchain as a Medium: “Social media is separating and ephemeral—we post pictures to distinguish ourselves from our inferiors, but these pictures disappear—whereas blockchains are harmonic and permanent—we all post distinct signatures but only to ensure the perpetuation of one, unbroken social history. It is due to these dramatic inversions that the distributed ledger is likely the pivotal technology of the 21st century, the only one that matches the printing press and mass media in the magnitude of its cognitive and social implications.”
The Hidden Against the Manifest: “The remarkable capacity we have for curiosity exists in us right from the start. It is not learned but a given part of our natures. To be human is to ask the question of the meaning of being. I cannot look at anything and assume that it is simply there. I mean, yes, it is there. This computer. This empty cup of coffee. The sounds of birds outside in the bird sanctuary next to my home. The feeling of a cool breeze moving around me. The distant hellish hum of a leaf blower. Thereness is unavoidable. But to be aware of the world—I mean, really aware—is to notice that it is the hidden that makes the manifest manifest.”
The Red Hand Files: “Joy as armour.”